


A Pin-Light Bent

by believeinmycroft



Category: Ancient Greek Religion & Lore, The Iliad - Homer
Genre: Introspection, M/M, The Iliad, Trojan War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-04
Updated: 2020-08-04
Packaged: 2021-03-06 04:36:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,164
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25707532
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/believeinmycroft/pseuds/believeinmycroft
Summary: “And my life, until the time is spent // Is a pin-light, bent.”-Patroclus' most treasured memories flit before him in his last moments, like sunlight dappling through trees.Achilles is in most of them.
Relationships: Achilles & Patroclus, Achilles/Patroclus
Comments: 5
Kudos: 28





	A Pin-Light Bent

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into 中文-普通话 國語 available: [寸缕折光](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26407864) by [Prozaco](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Prozaco/pseuds/Prozaco)



"But Hector, seeing brave Patroclus withdraw, struck by the blade, made his way to him through the ranks, and drove at him with his spear [...] death took him, and his spirit, loosed from his limbs, fled down to Hades, bemoaning its fate and leaving youth and manhood behind."

\- The Iliad, Book 16

"My life comes and goes / Short flight, free rows / I lie down and doze //

My life came and went / Short flight, free descent //

[...] it's mine / Or, at least, it's lent / And my life, until the time is spent / Is a pin-light, bent”

  
\- ‘A Pin-Light Bent’ - Joanna Newsom

-

There was a time, before Achilles, before the cool marble passageways of Phthia, when the things Patroclus talked to most were the twinkling constellations in the bruised blue-black night, and the shape of cloud animals crawling wispily across the sky.

_Before Achilles._

Patroclus had never liked to talk about his boyhood with Achilles. Viewed through his own hazy lens of a child’s gradually expanding awareness, the seemingly endless nights of quiet and grasses tickling the back of his neck and tracing his finger along the twinkling lights of the heavens were a warm memory, a cocoon of peace unassailed by the broad, harsh strokes of his childhood. Other memories, his father’s sternness, his wiry limbs and disappointingly small stature, the isolation, were all highlighted in his memory as vivid as crisscrossing splashes of blood on white marble.

But when Achilles heard about these memories, his face would drop. There was something sad, Achilles always said, about a child growing up so cut off from other people. If they were in public, the seriousness would flicker over his face and vanish as quick as if the wet circle of one’s breath on glass had been wiped away, and Achilles would laugh or smack his shoulder in jest, and begin talking about tactics or that evening’s dinner.

In private was another matter. Achilles never became some changed, effeminate person when it was just he and Patroclus, like some would whisper in the halls, in other tents. The brash words, the bristling, frenetic energy always stayed. But the hard press of his jaw softened under Patroclus’ fingers, and his steely eyes thawed when illuminated by the firelight next to their bed. Then, the seriousness would stay for as long as he talked.

Patroclus blinks.

He had been hit out of nowhere; his helmet ripped off his head, his spear broken, the pieces clattering away into mist. When he was struck in the back again the shock of it against his flesh had reverberated through his bones. His shield had loosened, as had his mind, snapping from sharp adrenaline to a thick haze, as if his senses had been ripped away from him. Drawing back into the thrum of warm, damp bodies, for a moment there had been simply chaos and dust and panic.

And then Hector had come, charging not with a roar but with the calculated grace of a lion curling closer for its kill, metal flashing in sunlight. A single spear thrust, and then pain in his stomach, and the cold shroud of fear washing over his skin, and he had fallen back, the world around him fading to a dull roar.

One’s fate is often written by the gods – that, as much as anything, Patroclus knows to be true. Perhaps he incurred their wrath by slitting the throats and cleaving the flesh of so many soldiers. Zeus, or maybe Apollo, is to blame.

Above him, beyond the mist and smoke mingling brown and grey, blue sky stretches, fathomless as ever.

There had been a time, too, where Patroclus did not like looking at the sky. He had been a young boy, barely a man, when he had first learned how it felt to end a life. How the magnitude of what you’d done was like sharp poison on your tongue, a bitter acidity that left you clammy and frozen and on the verge of vomiting.

It had happened so quickly, and over a game. The toss of the dice, the anger rising like a wave, the shove, the boy’s blank eyes and twisted neck and unnaturally lax, open mouth. And the blood, which figured in his memory more vivid than anything else.

The sky had been beautiful and bright that day, and the disturbing contrast of the dirt soaked red against such endless beauty had left him gagging, spitting up bile unpredictably even months into his time at Phthia.

The boy’s death had uprooted his lonely but stable life, and haunted him since, no matter how far away he went. The killing never got easier. Even when it was necessary, the agony of it cut through him like steel, and the burden of it would weigh him down like stone. He had once naively said to Achilles that he would almost prefer to be slain than to take another life.

It is painful to remember that conversation here, when he is broken and dying.

Around him there are cries, calls for help and shouts and screams of pain from fallen soldiers, a cacophony of agony and aggression and panic mixed with the thud of footsteps and metal on wood. If Achilles were here, what would he be doing? Crying out? Steeling himself and charging into the fray with sword drawn? Holding Patroclus as the life drained out of him, like both of them had held so many – too many – other young soldiers?

He could still remember the first time Achilles had held him, and his fingers twitch with the memory, imagining the warmth, the comforting caress of gentle hands.

They had been on the cusp of growing into young men. Back then, they were already close, yet not as close as they would become. There had been … an event, he recalls, and at the evening meal Achilles had been the centre of attention. That should have been no surprise. And yet, when Patroclus saw the fair-haired youth surrounded by laughing admirers, something had risen in him, and he had stood from the rough-hewn dining table and left, threading his way through passageways to stand outside beneath the stars. Jealousy of the gods’ gifts, probably. Envy. The bitter resentment left him as soon as it had arrived, leaving only a hollow ache.

There was a soft noise, and Achilles emerged from the house. Silence lingered between them as the younger boy leaned on a column.

_Why do you not dine with us, Patroclus?_

_You seem popular, tonight_ , he had said in reply.

A smirk twisted Achilles’ lips. _Flatterers, the lot of them._ A pause. _I would not have expected you to be jealous._

Patroclus’ face had heated. _I am not._ Then, _Are you sure you would not prefer to be inside, with your so-called flatterers?_

A pause stretched, long enough for Patroclus to look up. Achilles’ gaze, so often hard as flint, was thoughtful in a way Patroclus could not quite place. He stepped closer.

The first slide of Achilles’ hands up his shoulders drew a shiver from Patroclus. They were warm, the skin on his palms weathered. Achilles’ hands came to land curled on his chest, fingers lingering at the edge of his tunic, thumbs brushing against collarbone. Patroclus was keenly aware of how close Achilles’ face was, the intimacy in this brazen gesture. Men did not usually do this, were not supposed to.

_If I wanted to be with them, I would be with them. But I would prefer to be with nobody but you._

_Why? I am nobody. Just—_

_Stop it._ The words had come sharp. _You do not know your own strength. Your humility, your kindness, your humanity. You are not nobody to me, dear Patroclus._

Achilles had made to step back and Patroclus, without thinking, had raised a hand and placed it over the one on his chest. The younger man had stopped with an audible breath.

Patroclus had not known what to say. At last, he had simply curled his fingers to thread them between the warm ones pressed against his chest. They knew each other, and Achilles would know what this meant.

When they first laid together several weeks later, Achilles clenched his hand the same way as he had that night, and that image, more than the curve of the youth’s lips wide-open in pleasure, or the slick press of hot skin, would figure most prominently in Patroclus’ memory.

Patroclus’ fingers twitch on his chest where they fell, searching for warm hands that are not there. They touch on ragged edges, like ripped parchment, and an uncomfortably familiar warm wetness smears between his fingertips. Through the heavy fog threatening to pull him down to Hades, he thinks, hazily, that he can feel his chest crying, oozing great tears of hot blood. 

He had cried back then, too. The stubbornness that Patroclus both loved and despised about Achilles had reared its ugly head, and their forces had suffered. Patroclus had come to Achilles with tears streaming down his face, his throat choked with emotion, and begged for the armour that was now stained with his own sweat and blood. He had not known whether he would return alive, just that he’d had to do something to halt the countless deaths of his comrades. He had cried, and Achilles had reprimanded him, but there was a softness to his words and he had acquiesced.

Through the thick shroud of fog and pain, Patroclus feels his heart beating, a tiny drum sending feeble shockwaves through his blood-slicked fingers.

A memory flits behind his eyelids. There’s a hazy glow around it, tattered like the edges of his torn flesh, so that he’s not quite sure if it is real or something he once dreamed up.

A cavernous room, cool marble walls. A servant announces him. But this is not important. This is not why he remembers this.

He is staring at the floor, only able to think about the boy’s head he’d cracked open on rock, about the blood-sticky hair, the shame. Then a cough, the phlegmy clearing of a throat, his eyes drawn up by the sound.

His first impression is of a shock of feathered, golden hair, like the plumage of a magnificent bird ruffled in flight. Full lips curved in mirth. Fair, glowing skin.

By the time the young Achilles’ gaze meets his own eyes, Patroclus knows in a heartbeat what the boy will become to him. What they will become to each other. His heart had thrummed in his chest, as much as it is now. And yet …

Had he really known that day what would become of him and Achilles? For all he knew, the memory was blemished like old glass, had become what it was only after years spent together, years of gazing at the warm glow of Achilles’ skin and the flicker of firelight in his eyes.

Maybe, Patroclus thinks through the bleary haze, it doesn’t matter. Perhaps Achilles and he had always been destined to have their paths intertwined. Perhaps they had not.

One’s fate is often written by the gods – that, as much as anything, Patroclus knows to be true – or at least he thought he knew, once upon a time, when the world made more sense and there was not nine years of war and endless pain, and he had not been cut down, carved from a man into a mumbling, shaking corpse.

Achilles had always had his fate set in stone, had been a child of destiny and fate and great myth. Patroclus had been, simply, a boy. Just another of the thousands whose lives were not sung of by minstrels, who were not born of gods, who were not fated to save lands and command vast armies and die heroes.

Perhaps, Patroclus had not always been destined for this life. But, by his own choices – a smile here, a touch of the shoulder there, whispered words in dark tents – he had sealed his own fate. He was almost sure, now, that he had been destined, from that day forward, to die for Achilles. Not destined through the god’s plans, but by his own. By his love. 

Patroclus feels the life trickling out of him with the blood from his chest, and by the time Hector’s face, crazed eyes ringed with dirt and sweat, comes into view, all he can do is mumble. The words slide from his mouth without him quite knowing what he might be saying. It does not matter.

Achilles’ face, that first day, the one that has taken on a mythic quality ever since, flickers warm and comforting in his mind’s eye.

_There are far worse fates,_ Patroclus thinks, _than to die for the man one loves._

He lets the fog creep over him, tugging him with firm tendrils down to Hades, and as he exhales his last breath clouds scuttle across the blue sky far above, and beyond, the stars twinkle restlessly in a fathomless night.

**Author's Note:**

> This work is not quite as long or slashy as others I've written, but there's a good reason for that: it was actually written as the final English assignment for my B.Arts degree. We were lucky enough to choose to do a creative response, and you can bet I jumped at the chance to write Iliad fanfiction. There's something oddly beautiful about writing queer fanfic as my final assignment in a literal uni degree - and even more amusingly, I got great marks for it. 
> 
> It's also worth mentioning that my goal with this creative response was to rewrite part of the Iliad in the style of a modern author. For me, that author was the wonderfully poetic David Malouf, whose Iliad-inspired novel _Ransom_ is well worth a read. 
> 
> As always, thanks for reading <3


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